Month: January 2017

Well, I can officially say the Clomid didn’t work: cycle number three reached an undignified end when I burst into our bedroom yesterday morning, covered in snot and tears, brandishing a negative pregnancy test. J was less understanding than I would have hoped. He managed a croaky “I’m sorry” from under the bedclothes. To be fair it was 6am.

Wednesday was also the day we went to see the infertility specialist for the first time. It took us almost six months just to get the appointment, so I guess a part of me was hoping to come out with some kind of miracle – or at least another few rounds of Clomid. Or, you know. A newborn.

We didn’t get any of those. We also didn’t get much eye contact, or much of her looking at anything other than her screen. We told her our entire story – what felt like the 6,000th time we have gone through it with someone in the NHS – and then I started crying, and she had no idea what to do other than push a box of tissues across her desk.

(NHS tissues are tiny, by the way. Each one is designed to absorb a single tear. I used almost the whole box, then I felt bad for wasting NHS resources. Welcome to austerity Britain.)

She referred me for an HSG, a delightful little procedure whereby they inject dye into your uterus and fallopian tubes, then x-ray you to assess whether there are any blockages, and also yet another, internal, ultrasound. (I didn’t even know you could do an internal ultrasound until all this began. Imagine my surprise when they first whipped out the wand…)

When I woke up this morning I felt… bleak. Until now, there’s been a glimmer of hope that we can do this naturally, or as naturally as possible, without more involvement from doctors.

But yesterday the gynae all but told us outright IVF is likely to be the only way forward. That means more prodding, more poking – and months and months more waiting.

It’s the waiting that’s killing me. The earliest follow-up appointment, after the tests are done, is in July. For someone as impatient as I am, 18 months of trying has been a peculiar kind of torture. The suggestion it will be another seven months before we even begin to proceed with the bureaucracy surrounding IVF might just destroy me.